{"id":6757,"date":"2019-01-26T10:14:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-26T10:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/teachers-tired-of-pointless-emails\/"},"modified":"2019-01-26T10:14:54","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T10:14:54","slug":"teachers-tired-of-pointless-emails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/teachers-tired-of-pointless-emails\/","title":{"rendered":"Teachers tired of pointless emails"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\"Lotta\"<\/span>

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\n “Why didn’t my child get all As?” is the type of question Lotta Juvin doesn’t want to see in her emails
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An overload of emails, including in the evenings and weekends, is threatening to leave England’s teachers exhausted, with no off-switch from their working lives, warns the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the annual Bett Show for educational technology, he warned that feedback to parents had gone from a quick chat at parents’ evenings to being expected to be available every hour of the waking day.<\/p>\n

“I’m sure none of us now could imagine a life without email but do we ever stop to think how much of our day is actually spent reading or replying to them?” he said, in a speech at London’s Excel Centre.<\/p>\n

But what was the experience of teachers at the show? <\/p>\n

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\n Neelam Parmar says her school discourages sending or replying to emails in the evening
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It’s an event, with 34,000 visitors and 700 high-tech companies showing their devices, apps and software – and selling the positive impact of technology. <\/p>\n

It’s the type of place that can offer “solution dens” without even a trace of irony.<\/p>\n

Jon Barker, head of digital at Highams Park School, in Walthamstow, east London, says schools have gone from being virtually an email-free zone to having a sudden surge of online communication.<\/p>\n

“Everyone thinks that the email they’re sending is important,” he says.<\/p>\n

“But a teacher’s job is to teach a class, not to communicate with 30 sets of parents.”<\/p>\n

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\n Jon Barker says that schools have to find ways to manage expectations about answering emails
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The difficulty with emails for teachers, he says, is that they rapidly proliferate and every answer to a parent can start another set of conversations.<\/p>\n

He says it’s not “healthy” for staff to end up working late every night, trying to cope with answering complicated individual emails from dozens of parents.<\/p>\n

And that’s on top of all the internal admin emails that take up so much time in every organisation.<\/p>\n